Monday, November 2, 2015
GOVERNANCE : Narendra Modi is the best thing that could have happened to Pakistan.
SOURCE ::http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-347285-Modis-India%E2%80%A6Pakistans-opportunity
Narendra Modi
is the best thing that could have happened
to
Pakistan.
PART - ONE OF TWO
To The Point with Karan Thapar
PART - TWO OF TWO
Narendra Modi is the best thing
that
could have happened to Pakistan.
Islamabad Diary
Narendra Modi is the best thing that could have happened to Pakistan. He is making India look like General Zia’s Pakistan.
Can there be a bigger favour to Pakistan than that?
Assaults on liberalism, threats to free speech, people killed because of their beliefs or what they stand for, hate and bigotry on the loose, extreme expressions of religiosity, indeed religion entering the political discourse like never before…these were things that were supposed to happen in Pakistan.
And Indians were wont to preen themselves no end because their country, ‘Shining India’, the India of myth and fantasy, the India of the adman’s imagination, was above these failings which painted Pakistan in dark colours. Small wonder, in conversations with Pakistanis, Indians were all too apt to adopt a patronising tone…redolent of smugness and a superior attitude.
And as the world was never allowed to forget, India was the world’s largest democracy. The accepted wisdom was that India was on the march while Pakistan was home to religious extremism and all kinds of violence.
It was all a bit tiresome but there was no cure for it as every now and then something would happen in Pakistan – someone, usually someone poor, charged with blasphemy, a Christian community attacked, someone shot because of his faith or denomination, another terrorist incident – which captured world headlines and reinforced the image of a country overwhelmed by its troubles.
But Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister and the fillip this has given to Hindu fundamentalism – the idea that India is a Hindu nation – have dramatically altered this equation. Whereas Pakistan is slowly emerging from its fundamentalist quagmire, moving away from the religious extremism that was its biggest problem, India is lurching in the other direction.
Sonia Faleiro, an Indian journalist, thus writes in the New
York Times: “In today’s India, secular liberals
face a challenge: how to stay alive.
In August, 77-year old scholar M M Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dhabolkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstition.”
And a Muslim man in an Uttar Pradesh village is brutally beaten and killed over the rumour of beef-eating. Writers, to their credit, have returned their awards and Sharmila Tagore, the well-known actor, warns that the present climate of intolerance in India is like the atmosphere prevailing at the time of Mrs Gandhi’s 1975-77 emergency and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But these are voices in the wilderness. The prevailing mood is one of intolerance and fear.
The prime minister himself is silent, just as he was silent when rampaging Hindu mobs carried out a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, the state he ruled as chief minister. There were people who believed that as prime minister he would be a different man. But as events in India testify, he hasn’t changed his spots. Narendra Modi remains a man wedded to the extreme Hindu ideology of the organisation of which he has been an ardent follower most of his adult life: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Hindutva ideology is a form of Nazism. Call it native or saffron Nazism. It is based on the racialist notion that India is a Hindu nation with no place for Muslims or people of other faiths. The opportunity for Pakistan in this mess is clear. For too long Pakistan has been seen as a haven of bigotry and intolerance. And it has been vilified and denounced for the same. Now India is becoming a Hindu Pakistan, or what Pakistan had become before it decided to tackle the monster of religious extremism. India’s loss should be Pakistan’s gain.
But this gain becomes worthwhile and enduring if Pakistan opens the vistas of its mind further and becomes a more enlightened place. The heyday of Pakistani fundamentalism is already over. The power of the gun-wielding mullah wanting to establish an Islamic emirate, while not eliminated, has been dealt a serious blow. The space so won needs to be expanded and made secure.
There’s too much corruption in our public life. Something needs to be done about that. The delivery of services vital to everyday life – administration, police, judicial system – should improve. Are we spending enough on health? Isn’t it high time we thought about having one education system throughout the country, the same books for everyone but better books and with none of the nonsense purveyed in subjects like Pakistan Studies?
Our entire outlook, the way we look at things, the way we discuss them, needs to become more rational and ‘modern’. We have to move away from outmoded methods of thinking. If India is embracing dogma, let it. We have been here earlier, with too much of dogma part of our national thinking. We need to discard it. The spirit of enquiry is the basis of learning. We must learn to foster this spirit.
Western countries are not irreligious countries. Most of them subscribe to the Christian faith. Our faith is Islam, the faith of the majority in this country. The west has gone through its religious tribulations. It no longer wears religion on its sleeves. We also must learn to discard the habit of wearing our religion on our sleeves.
The loudspeaker, more than the Kalashnikov, is the single most important source of religious mischief in our society. Its unchecked use and power has been tempered. It needs to be brought further under control. And there must be no misuse of the blasphemy law. The Supreme Court judgement rejecting Mumtaz Qadri’s appeal – pertaining to the man who shot Governor Salmaan Taseer – is a landmark judgement in the way it throws light on the blasphemy issue.
And we have to get one thing into our heads. We don’t have to match India missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We make our own bazookas, our own tanks, and our own nuke bombs. In any rational calculation this is more than enough deterrence. We have a strong army, a strong air force. We need better schools and colleges, more research, more knowledge. We should have greater confidence in ourselves and we should learn to talk less about India and the Indian threat. Not in nuclear arms but in tolerance, enlightenment, rationality and understanding we must be seen as superior to India…and in music too and in the arts.
Our wise men used to think that the TTP (the Taliban native to Pakistan) represented an insurmountable challenge. They thought Karachi was beyond solving. They have been proved wrong. Pakistan has taken on tough challenges and is seeing them through successfully. Cannot the people of Pakistan confront the problem of prohibition in a rational manner? Cannot the veil of hypocrisy surrounding this issue, for issue it is, be rent asunder?
The law forbids the acquisition and consumption of liquor. The reality is otherwise, with every known brand of the forbidden stuff in every large city just a telephone call away. The law and reality must be brought in harmony – through whatever stratagem or hypocrisy comes readily to hand – because prohibition, like it or not, is not a hallmark of a rational society. It serves to promote Pakistan’s backward image, besides encouraging criminal behaviour. What goes to the bootleg man must go to the legitimate taxman. In this respect our model should be Dubai, not Saudi Arabia. Dubai is an eminently pragmatic emirate, which is the outstanding reason for its economic success.
To sum up, Narendra Modi is a godsend to Pakistan. More power to Hindutva, more power to the saffron Nazism of the RSS, the spiritual fountainhead before which the Indian prime minister bows. If we master our internal weaknesses, expand the sphere of enlightenment and tolerance, there is nothing that we have to fear from any other quarter.
Narendra Modi
is the best thing that could have happened
to
Pakistan.
PART - ONE OF TWO
Exclusive: PM Modi's silence deliberate, says Arun Shourie
A day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley termed Prime Minister Narendra Modi the worst victim of ideological intolerance, former union minister Arun Shourie on Monday said that PM Modi must speak out on intolerance.
IndiaToday.in | New Delhi, November 2, 2015 | Edited by Sangeeta Ojha | UPDATED 20:59 IST
19 SHARES
A day after Finance Minister Arun Jaitley termed Prime Minister Narendra Modi the worst victim of ideological intolerance, former union minister Arun Shourie on Monday said that PM Modi must speak out on intolerance.
"Designating Modi as a victim of intolerance is the most dangerous thing to do because it will give him grounds to be vengeful," cautioned Shourie.
In an exclusive interview to India Today Television's Karan Thapar, Shourie said that the prime minister's behaviour has lowered him to the level of RJD chief Lalu Prasad and made Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar a statesman.
Fringe groups getting encouraged
Shourie said that the prime minister's silence was deliberate and it encouraged the fringe groups. A ruler is known by the character of the persons surrounding him.
"If you go back to the election speeches by Modi. He talked of pink revolution. Beef business can be linked to it. They were encouraged by people around Modi who used provocative language and did not break his silence on the Dadri lynching," he said.
Wrong to call writers, scientists rabid
The former minister from Vajpayee-led government supported the writers' protest of returning their awards against intolerance in the society.
"It is the Gandhian thing to do. In August 1921, Congress appealed to the people those who have titles should return them. He condemned senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley's comment that these elements were rabid as inexcusable because it applies to noted scientist C N R Rao, RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, eminent micro-biologist PM Bhargava and ex-Navy chief Adm Ramdas," he said.
On rising intolerance
The former NDA minister said that Modi tweets inconsequentially, but is silent after the Dadri lynching incident.
Watch the entire show of To The Point here
PART - TWO OF TWO
Narendra Modi is the best thing
that
could have happened to Pakistan.
Islamabad Diary
Narendra Modi is the best thing that could have happened to Pakistan. He is making India look like General Zia’s Pakistan.
Can there be a bigger favour to Pakistan than that?
Assaults on liberalism, threats to free speech, people killed because of their beliefs or what they stand for, hate and bigotry on the loose, extreme expressions of religiosity, indeed religion entering the political discourse like never before…these were things that were supposed to happen in Pakistan.
And Indians were wont to preen themselves no end because their country, ‘Shining India’, the India of myth and fantasy, the India of the adman’s imagination, was above these failings which painted Pakistan in dark colours. Small wonder, in conversations with Pakistanis, Indians were all too apt to adopt a patronising tone…redolent of smugness and a superior attitude.
And as the world was never allowed to forget, India was the world’s largest democracy. The accepted wisdom was that India was on the march while Pakistan was home to religious extremism and all kinds of violence.
It was all a bit tiresome but there was no cure for it as every now and then something would happen in Pakistan – someone, usually someone poor, charged with blasphemy, a Christian community attacked, someone shot because of his faith or denomination, another terrorist incident – which captured world headlines and reinforced the image of a country overwhelmed by its troubles.
But Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister and the fillip this has given to Hindu fundamentalism – the idea that India is a Hindu nation – have dramatically altered this equation. Whereas Pakistan is slowly emerging from its fundamentalist quagmire, moving away from the religious extremism that was its biggest problem, India is lurching in the other direction.
Sonia Faleiro, an Indian journalist, thus writes in the New
York Times: “In today’s India, secular liberals
face a challenge: how to stay alive.
In August, 77-year old scholar M M Kalburgi, an outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in 2013, the activist Narendra Dhabolkar was murdered for campaigning against religious superstition.”
And a Muslim man in an Uttar Pradesh village is brutally beaten and killed over the rumour of beef-eating. Writers, to their credit, have returned their awards and Sharmila Tagore, the well-known actor, warns that the present climate of intolerance in India is like the atmosphere prevailing at the time of Mrs Gandhi’s 1975-77 emergency and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But these are voices in the wilderness. The prevailing mood is one of intolerance and fear.
The prime minister himself is silent, just as he was silent when rampaging Hindu mobs carried out a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, the state he ruled as chief minister. There were people who believed that as prime minister he would be a different man. But as events in India testify, he hasn’t changed his spots. Narendra Modi remains a man wedded to the extreme Hindu ideology of the organisation of which he has been an ardent follower most of his adult life: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Hindutva ideology is a form of Nazism. Call it native or saffron Nazism. It is based on the racialist notion that India is a Hindu nation with no place for Muslims or people of other faiths. The opportunity for Pakistan in this mess is clear. For too long Pakistan has been seen as a haven of bigotry and intolerance. And it has been vilified and denounced for the same. Now India is becoming a Hindu Pakistan, or what Pakistan had become before it decided to tackle the monster of religious extremism. India’s loss should be Pakistan’s gain.
But this gain becomes worthwhile and enduring if Pakistan opens the vistas of its mind further and becomes a more enlightened place. The heyday of Pakistani fundamentalism is already over. The power of the gun-wielding mullah wanting to establish an Islamic emirate, while not eliminated, has been dealt a serious blow. The space so won needs to be expanded and made secure.
There’s too much corruption in our public life. Something needs to be done about that. The delivery of services vital to everyday life – administration, police, judicial system – should improve. Are we spending enough on health? Isn’t it high time we thought about having one education system throughout the country, the same books for everyone but better books and with none of the nonsense purveyed in subjects like Pakistan Studies?
Our entire outlook, the way we look at things, the way we discuss them, needs to become more rational and ‘modern’. We have to move away from outmoded methods of thinking. If India is embracing dogma, let it. We have been here earlier, with too much of dogma part of our national thinking. We need to discard it. The spirit of enquiry is the basis of learning. We must learn to foster this spirit.
Western countries are not irreligious countries. Most of them subscribe to the Christian faith. Our faith is Islam, the faith of the majority in this country. The west has gone through its religious tribulations. It no longer wears religion on its sleeves. We also must learn to discard the habit of wearing our religion on our sleeves.
The loudspeaker, more than the Kalashnikov, is the single most important source of religious mischief in our society. Its unchecked use and power has been tempered. It needs to be brought further under control. And there must be no misuse of the blasphemy law. The Supreme Court judgement rejecting Mumtaz Qadri’s appeal – pertaining to the man who shot Governor Salmaan Taseer – is a landmark judgement in the way it throws light on the blasphemy issue.
And we have to get one thing into our heads. We don’t have to match India missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We make our own bazookas, our own tanks, and our own nuke bombs. In any rational calculation this is more than enough deterrence. We have a strong army, a strong air force. We need better schools and colleges, more research, more knowledge. We should have greater confidence in ourselves and we should learn to talk less about India and the Indian threat. Not in nuclear arms but in tolerance, enlightenment, rationality and understanding we must be seen as superior to India…and in music too and in the arts.
Our wise men used to think that the TTP (the Taliban native to Pakistan) represented an insurmountable challenge. They thought Karachi was beyond solving. They have been proved wrong. Pakistan has taken on tough challenges and is seeing them through successfully. Cannot the people of Pakistan confront the problem of prohibition in a rational manner? Cannot the veil of hypocrisy surrounding this issue, for issue it is, be rent asunder?
The law forbids the acquisition and consumption of liquor. The reality is otherwise, with every known brand of the forbidden stuff in every large city just a telephone call away. The law and reality must be brought in harmony – through whatever stratagem or hypocrisy comes readily to hand – because prohibition, like it or not, is not a hallmark of a rational society. It serves to promote Pakistan’s backward image, besides encouraging criminal behaviour. What goes to the bootleg man must go to the legitimate taxman. In this respect our model should be Dubai, not Saudi Arabia. Dubai is an eminently pragmatic emirate, which is the outstanding reason for its economic success.
To sum up, Narendra Modi is a godsend to Pakistan. More power to Hindutva, more power to the saffron Nazism of the RSS, the spiritual fountainhead before which the Indian prime minister bows. If we master our internal weaknesses, expand the sphere of enlightenment and tolerance, there is nothing that we have to fear from any other quarter.
Islamabad Diary
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com
OROP ::One Rank One Pension : Why not immediately notify the OROP for family pensioners and POTSs?
SOURCE ::http://7thpaycommissionnews.in/one-rank-one-pension-why-not-immediately-notify-the-orop-for-family-pensioners-and-potss/
Needless to emphasise that the POTOs are those who retire at an young age of 33-37 years in public interest and therefore they are the one who deserve OROP the most. It was their pension which was drastically reduced from 75% to 50% in 1973 and it is for this very reason alone, they are eligible for OROP.
One Rank One Pension :
Why not immediately notify the OROP
for
family pensioners and POTSs?
BY
WHY NOT IMMEDIATELY NOTIFY THE OROP FOR FAMILY PENSIONERS & POTOs?
POTOs are those who retire at an young age of 33-37 years
We might have all read an article couple of days ago appeared in Business Standard newspaper indicating that the due to weak financial position, the union government is mulling with the idea of pushing the implementation of OROP to next fiscal year, which means the implementation might be delayed at least by 5-6 months.
In my personal opinion both the previous and present governments have mishandled the OROP issue and they have perhaps failed to understand the real issues involved in their proper perspective. As suggested in my previous write up if the government would have chosen to introduce an element of age on retirement, in OROP, the expenditure on account of OROP would be less than half the currently estimated expenditure of 8300 crores per annum.
Going by the charts put out by various ESM blogs it appears that if OROP is implemented, every officer will be benefitted ten times more than the POTOs. Considering that there are ten times more POTO veterans than the veteran officers, the total expenditure on account of OROP will be divided equally between the officers and POTOs. So, if the age limit is introduced in OROP, then the GOI can save approximately 4000 crores every year. Anyway it would be difficult to do now and in any case, it can’t be done over night! This needs tremendous political will and high calibre administrative skill.
Therefore, in the present situation, the least that the government can do is to notify the implementation of OROP for Widows and POTOs immediately and pay the first instalment of arrears without much delay.
Needless to emphasise that the POTOs are those who retire at an young age of 33-37 years in public interest and therefore they are the one who deserve OROP the most. It was their pension which was drastically reduced from 75% to 50% in 1973 and it is for this very reason alone, they are eligible for OROP.
How can those who have served to the maximum permissible age or service, resulting in their pension increase by an additional 30%, agitate to claim OROP? Under what rules and on what logic??
Interestingly, the minimum amount of pension plus DR that an officer at the lowest rank is expected to receive under OROP is more than two months salary of a sepoy. What an irony! How much more Pension do they need to lead a decent life in their 60s, 70s & 80s?
In response to my last article published in this blog, one of the senior veterans mailed to me stating that the OROP is not meant to rectify the anomaly but meant to bridge the gap between the past and present pensioners. I have no reason to differ with him, rather I am in full agreement with him.
No doubt that the concept of OROP is exactly the same. But the concept is completely different from the reasons. The concept of OROP is applicable to all pensioners including para military personnel and civil pensioners. But the reasons are unique to each group. What did we do while demanding OROP? We have built up a strong justification for extending this benefit exclusively to military veterans by citing the three cardinal reasons, which I have elaborated in my last article.
In the absence of these strong and genuine reasons no government would have agreed to grant OROP only to military personnel. The agitating veteran leaders knew it more than anybody else. They also knew very well that unless they piggy back on these reasons which are applicable only to NCOs & JCOs, they have no chance of getting OROP at all. After all they have had no valid reasons of their own for such a demand. Therefore these reasons were articulated effectively and continuously in public platforms. The leaders have so cleverly and forcefully articulated these reasons in every available platform that public at large started believing that these reasons are true to all military veterans including the officers. I salute our leaders for this dubious achievement!
They did not stop at it. They were worried that their bluff will one day be called off. So they took full control of the agitation into their own hands and started dictating it. Simultaneously, they established back-channel contacts with the political leaders and bureaucrats to negotiate a deal favourable to them before it is too late. They have succeeded to some extent in this endeavour as well.
But, we now know of all these manipulations and we are not going to take them silently anymore. We will defend our justify and demand what is due to us with all our might and strength.
It would therefore be desirable if the officers who are not eligible for OROP on the basis the three reasons articulated by themselves, encourage the GOI to notify the OROP immediately at least for POTOs & Widows and refrain gracefully from further agitation so that the already existing gap between the officers and ORs in the perception of OROP does not widen any further.
The veteran community of NCOs and JCOs on their part should mobilise members for AFVAI and strengthen it so that we are never ignored or marginalised from now on.
Sgt MPKaran
President
Karnataka Chapter, AFVAI
President
Karnataka Chapter, AFVAI
Source: http://afvaindia.blogspot.in/
RELATED READINGS
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OROP :: Indira Gandhi would have handled OROP issue far better than Modi
SOURCE :;
http://www.dailyo.in/politics/orop-indian-army-narendra-modi-indira-gandhi-kp-singh-deo-upa-nda-ex-servicemen-jantar-mantar/story/1/6034.html
http://www.dailyo.in/politics/orop-indian-army-narendra-modi-indira-gandhi-kp-singh-deo-upa-nda-ex-servicemen-jantar-mantar/story/1/6034.html
Indira Gandhi would have handled
OROP
issue far better than Modi
BY
The ex-servicemen are bitter because the scheme
has not materialised despite multiple assurances
by the PM.
An ugly relay hunger strike by ex-servicemen across the country which has thoroughly embarrassed the government enters its 81st day today even as the government celebrates the 50th anniversary of a war with Pakistan in which many of these veterans fought. The veterans are angry over the delay in the government implementing its promise of "One Rank One Pension" (OROP), or the same pension for the same length of service irrespective of the date of retirement.
"One Rank One Pension" was first defined in the obscure report of the high-level committee on problems of ex-servicemen that has since disappeared into government archives. In March 1984, then prime minister Indira Gandhi constituted India’s first high-level committee on ex-servicemen. She had held the defence minister’s portfolio for two years after her return to power in 1980 and was conscious of the disquiet within the community of ex-servicemen. A stream of complaints poured into her office from military pensioners. These were the soldiers recruited after the massive expansion of the Army following the border war with China in 1962. These soldiers had fought the wars of 1965 and 1971 with Pakistan and were now starting to retire. Every year, nearly 60,000 soldiers were having to contend with problems their fathers and grandfathers never had to face. They had reduced pensions — the government had, in 1973, reduced pensions from 75 per cent of the last pay drawn, to 50 per cent. This was the fallout of a 1973 decision by the Indira Gandhi government to bring all central government employees, including soldiers, under the ambit of the Pay Commission.
Soldiers could serve upto 15 years as opposed to just seven years until the 1960s. But after retirement, they found limited avenues for employment. The conditions of widows of soldiers who had retired before 1964 was dismal. They were not eligible for the family pension of Rs 175 given to them. This unfairly bracketed group of widows survived on monthly doles of Rs 50 from state governments.
Indira Gandhi chose her young minister of state for defence, Kamakhya Prasad Singh Deo, to head the high-level committee on ex-servicemen. It was an appropriate choice. Deo was one of the few members of Parliament to have been deployed in combat while being a parliamentarian. An MP from Dhenkanal in Odisha, he was a second lieutenant in the Territorial Army. He had been deployed with the 144th Air Defence Artillery regiment to guard the Lalru ammunition dump near Chandigarh.
Deo’s 17-member committee also comprised several junior ministers in the Congress government - PA Sangma, MPs like Rajesh Pilot and Jaswant Singh, then Kerala home minister Vayalar Ravi and then Maharashtra home minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.
Defence pensions were not part of the committee’s terms of reference, but it had to be included because it was the top priority of ex-servicemen wherever the committee members went.
In its 166-page report, the committee first mentioned "One Rank One Pension" in sentences which have by now gone on to define this contentious subject:
"Ex-servicemen throughout the country have raised the point very emphatically. They are of the view that a Defence Forces pensioner, irrespective of his date of retirement, should get the same pension as another pensioner who retired later for the same rank and the same length of service. Whenever pensions are revised, the same should be applicable and automatically and with prospective effect to existing pension, widows' pension and so on, whenever revised should again be automatically applicable to older cases. The committee requests the government to consider this matter particularly in the light of the principle which has been established regarding the pensions of judges of the Supreme Court and high courts."
The committee submitted its 166-page report in seven months, on October 27, 1984, five months ahead of its deadline. It was just four days before Indira Gandhi’s assassination. It is not clear if the prime minister actually saw the report and its suggestion of OROP. What we do know is that a majority of its 69 recommendations, like improvement in the efficiency of the Allahabad-based Controller of Defence Accounts (Pensions) and the grant of family pensions to approximately 25,000 "pre-1.1.1964 widows of pensioners", were finally implemented.
Only two recommendations - for an ex-servicemen’s commission to look into the problems of veterans, and OROP — were shelved. They were implemented by the outgoing UPA government in 2014, but without a financial outlay.
OROP now haunts the NDA government because Prime Minister Narendra Modi made it an article of faith for his government. The ex-servicemen protesting at Jantar Mantar are especially bitter because the scheme has not materialised despite multiple assurances by the prime minister.
We can only speculate about what the late prime minister Indira Gandhi would have done about OROP. But one thing is clear. The astute politician that she was, she would never have made a commitment without first studying its financial implications. And once having committed to it, would not have delayed its implementation.
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